1. Suppose, for reductio, that the worst conceivable objection to the FTA -- the puddle analogy -- doesn't exist.
2. If the worst conceivable objection to the FTA doesn't exist, then we can conceive of an objection that is worse than the worst conceivable objection to the FTA (namely, an existent puddle analogy).
3. We cannot conceive of an objection that is worse than the worst conceivable objection to the FTA.
4. So, the worst conceivable objection to the FTA -- the puddle analogy -- exists.
It's knowable a priori that *someone* would make this objection... so maybe we shouldn't be irritated about it!
Interesting argument. However this does not necessitate the existence of the puddle analogy as the worst possible objection to the FTA.
It could have been any other objection the worst one, but it is this one. Not by necessity, it just happens to be.
So this "ontological" argument for the worst possible objection to the FTA only goes to the point that there is a worst objection to the FTA but it can't necessitate which one is it.
"The puddle goes wrong in falsely assuming that the conditions that will produce them are very rare. But this is true in the case of fine-tuning, and has been established to be so by physicists."
We do not understand the process by which our universal constants were set well enough to make this claim. You're putting too much credence on the claims of some physicists - the science here is much more uncertain than this.
The steel man god of the gaps argument is “we were not sufficiently creative to think of evolution in the past, so perhaps we are not sufficiently creative to figure out an alternative hypothesis to fine tuning in the present.” The answer to it has to be logically excluding the possibility of other solutions.
Agreed that Douglas Adams wrote some hilarious books. However, I think your objection to puddles is a straw man. In your quote of Adams, he is clear that the puddle finds itself in a very specific hole, one that conforms to it perfectly. All the microscopic nooks and crannies are uniquely ideal to house the exact shape of the puddle. It is not a common easily replicated hole. The hole is likely one of a kind in its microscopic structure, statistically improbable.
I don't know if you've explained this before but wouldn't fine tuning still be a problem even if you assume the universe was made by God? You're simply pushing the fine-tuning back because now God needs to be fine-tuned to want to create a universe like this one as opposed to any other. And if you appeal to moral realism to explain why God would want to create us then the moral facts would need to be fine-tuned such that it would be good to create beings like us.
It's true that now God still needs to be one of many ways he conceivably be. But if we simply posit that he is perfect, that would explain fine tuning. And out of all the ways God might be, perfection is relatively simple. So it ought to have a certain Ockam appeal
But now you're just pushing the fine-tuning back to the moral facts/laws. The moral facts/laws would need to be fine-tuned in order to make this universe better than any other random universe we could conceive
>If the cosmological constant were different, for instance, the evolutionary process could never have gotten started.
If the cosmological constant were different, and its value didn't vary with respect to time (or space), and the mass-energy content of the universe wasn't altered to offset the constant's delta, and the strength of G didn't change to also offset the constant's delta, and God didn't interfere with the expansion rate of the universe in any other metaphysically possible way, the evolutionary process could never have gotten started.*
More important is that even if we do hold all that other stuff fixed, it's still false that the cosmological constant being different would have prevented evolutionary processes from getting started. The cosmological constant could have been at least 200 times bigger and infinity times smaller (this last point is actually an understatement - it could have been negative, too), and life would still be possible, even life that is just like the life that actually exists on Earth.
The part about the puddle disappearing sounds like a followup argument, not part of the argument against fine-tuning. We are mistaken like the puddle, therefore God doesn’t exist, therefore we should worry about disappearing. Not “natural laws show we should worry about disappearing, therefore God doesn’t exist”.
I went and found the original context (an essay in The Salmon of Doubt) and it seems to support this view. Immediately before your quote, Adams gives a non-analogical version of the same argument, but it doesn’t include the disappearing part: it ends by saying that early man reached “the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him.” Then, immediately following your quote, Adams elaborates on the disappearing idea in non-analogical context with the text below. Taken literally, Adams seems to be arguing that humanity should be worrying about how to survive the death of the sun in ~5 billion years. That seems a bit absurd to me, but I’d like to imagine that he also had shorter-term existential risks in mind. Either way, this isn’t part of the argument against God. Quote follows:
> We all know that at some point in the future the universe will come to an end, and at some other point, considerably in advance from that but still not immediately pressing, the sun will explode. We feel there’s plenty of time to worry about that, but on the other hand that’s a very dangerous thing to say. Look at what’s supposed to be going to happen on the first of January 2000—let’s not pretend that we didn’t have a warning that the century was going to end! I think that we need to take a larger perspective on who we are and what we are doing here if we are going to survive in the long term.
I think the puddle analogy is better than you give it credit for. It's not ignoring the fact that fine tuning is super unlikely - the point is that we should be skeptical of claims that the universe is super finely-tuned for life that rely on assumptions that conscious life must be similar to us. If we do, we're like the puddle, assuming that because the universe's laws seem perfect for allowing creatures like us to exist, they must have been made for us. A lot of arguments for fine-tuning point to things like carbon-based chemistry, and while these things are obviously necessary for human life, I don't think we can just assume that a universe without them couldn't have very different forms of life. Even the assumption that all life must exist on planets orbiting stars doesn't really seem warranted if we're considering universes with very different physics from our own.
The only claims of fine-tuning that seem to get around this objection are those based on the entropy of the early universe and the possibility that the universe might recollapse on itself if the cosmological constant was different. But neither the entropy of the universe nor the cosmological constant are finely-tuned for life (physicists often talk about the cosmological constant being finely tuned, but that's using a completely different meaning of the phrase "fine-tuning"). Both of them just needed to be low for life to exist, and both of them are way lower than they have to be for life to exist. The only reason that these low values are considered surprising is that there are specific models of how these constants get their values that, if true, would imply that they should have much larger values than they actually have. But obviously, that just means those models are wrong about how the values of these constants came about. It doesn't mean that there's no way to naturalistically explain their values - on the contrary, it seems entirely plausible for a naturalistic mechanism to give them low values.
"But obviously, that just means those models are wrong about how the values of these constants came about." - So essentially you are willing to accept our best physics... *unless* that theory would imply a good argument for theism, then an otherwise highly successful theory needs to be rejected. And people say THEISTS are the science deniers!
A science denier would be someone who keeps believing a certain physical model even after it makes a prediction about the value of a physical constant that's off by 122 orders of magnitude. What do you think science is? It's the process of updating our theories of how the world works to match experimental observations, not the process of continuing to believe models that we know are wrong.
And by the way, all physicists (yes, literally all of them) agree that what you're calling "our best physics" is wrong. What do you think all those particle accelerators, dark matter searches, and precision cosmology measurements are for? They're to get data to find out what the right theory is, since we know that a theory of particle physics that doesn't include dark matter; cosmic inflation; a mechanism for neutrino masses; accurate predictions of the vacuum energy, Higgs mass, or CP violate phase of the CKM matrix; or even gravity (yes, seriously, our current "best model" of particle physics doesn't even include gravity) cannot possibly be the final theory. The Standard Model of particle physics was never even meant to be a theory of everything - it was always meant to be only a low-energy approximation. But I guess we should just pretend that it is the theory of everything because it's "our best physics" and chalk up all discrepancies to the hand of God. Wouldn't want to be "anti-science" by actually doing science, would we?
The response in your first paragraph only works if you think theism has a very low prior - then from "If theory X, then theism; not theism; therefore, not theory X" you get a good modus tollens argument against the theory which predicts such an unlikely result. But then I wanna see the argument why theism has a very low prior.
Or in other words: The fact that an observation is unexpected on naturalism only gives you a good reason to doubt the observation if you already assume naturalism in the background.
Do you think it's expected on theism that God would make the correct model of the laws of physics be one that predicts that the cosmological constant should be 122 orders of magnitude larger than it actually is? The reasoning you're trying employ here would imply that literally any unsolved problem in physics is proof that God exists, and that anyone who suggests that maybe the problem is actually because our understanding of physics is wrong is assuming atheism.
And besides, this response ignores the fact that we know the model is wrong for a bunch of other reasons as well. If we actually had a full theory that predicts every known physical phenomenon with no experimental anomalies and no UV divergences, but it still required fine-tuning of some constants, then you would have a point. But we don't have anything close to that.
Quite the opposite - I am saying that the *positive* evidence we have is evidence for theism, not the *absence* of a solution to some kind of problem.
Yes, we know they are "wrong" in the same sense we know that either QM or General Relativity has to be wrong in at least one way, given their seeming incompatibility - but no sane physicists would deduce from this that we shouldn't take the claims that QM and GR make to be *evidence*. Again, that's just blatant science denialism.
> Quite the opposite - I am saying that the *positive* evidence we have is evidence for theism, not the *absence* of a solution to some kind of problem.
Your "positive evidence" is a discrepancy between theory and observation that we don't currently know the explanation for. This is the same as any other unsolved problem in physics that has ever existed throughout all of history. There's no reason to think this one is any different from all the problems in the past that were eventually solved by normal, physical mechanisms, and claiming that it is "science denial" to say that the correct explanation is probably of this sort is nonsensical. And in fact, the theoretical prediction in this case is much more tenuous than past cases of unsolved problems. The calculation that gives an estimated value for the cosmological constant that's 122 orders of magnitude higher than the actual value requires not just using our current Standard Model understanding but also making assumptions about how the true theory of everything that the SM is an approximation of works (for example, assuming that there is no new physics before the Planck scale, which is most likely false for reasons completely independent of the cosmological constant problem, assuming that there is no UV-IR coupling, etc.).
Tell me, what is the difference between your logic and someone who responds to the Michelson-Morley experiment by saying, "Our best understanding of electromagnetism requires the existence of the luminiferous ether to explain why Maxwell's equations are not Galilean invariant like Newton's are. Incredibly, this experiment proves that the luminiferous ether is finely-tuned to move in unison with the Earth. This is incredibly unlikely on naturalism - it must have been set up to move that way by God, perhaps to aid in our development of electromagnetic technology. Some people claim that our understanding of the ether must be wrong and that new physics will explain the Michelson-Morley result, but this only works if you assume theism has a very low prior. Then, from 'If ether, then theism; Not theism; Therefore, not ether,' you get a good modus tollens argument against the ether. But I wanna see the argument for why theism has a very low prior"? In both cases, we notice that a theory's prediction doesn't line up with experimental evidence and decide that this indicates a problem with the theory. So, we conclude that there is new physics that explains why the current theory got it wrong. This is how physics has always progressed. But you could explain away any experimental result by saying that the original theory is actually correct, and God just directly manipulated a certain phenomenon to cause results that were unexpected on the theory. You are claiming that it is "science denial" to do the normal thing that scientists always do when a theory's predictions fail - come up with a new theory that predicts the correct result - and that instead, the only way to not be a science denier is to say that God caused the theory's predictions to fail. That it just not how science works. You can believe that God finely tuned the cosmological constant if you want - science doesn't disprove that this is the case - but to claim that anyone who doesn't accept this explanation is a science denier is completely ridiculous.
> Yes, we know they are "wrong" in the same sense we know that either QM or General Relativity has to be wrong in at least one way, given their seeming incompatibility - but no sane physicists would deduce from this that we shouldn't take the claims that QM and GR make to be *evidence*.
I am not claiming that we shouldn't take the claims of the Standard Model to be evidence. Obviously, claims made by the Standard Model that fall within SM's domain of validity are perfectly fine evidence. But the vacuum catastrophe (the failed prediction of the value of the cosmological constant) is not that - it requires stretching the Standard Model far beyond the domain it's been tested in, and past the point where we're already confident that new physics exists, which the predicted value of the cosmological constant will be sensitive to. And furthermore, we *know* that the Standard Model is wrong about this point because we've measured the cosmological constant, and it's not what SM says it should be. You don't believe that the Standard Model's prediction is right either - it's just that you think the failure of the prediction is explained by God intentionally making the cosmological constant lower than SM physics says it should be, whereas I think there's probably some normal physical explanation. The only real question here is, "Why did the theoretical prediction fail?", not, "Did the theoretical prediction fail?" So what exactly do you think the failed theoretical prediction is supposed to be evidence for?
Also, if you think that the correct explanation is, "God set the physical constants to the values they have," then you also think the physical models for how their values came about are wrong. Those physical models don't involve divine intervention.
This question of God's existence has been agonized about for hundreds of years at this point, by people far more talented than myself or the writer. It all misses the point. Religion requires faith, the ability to believe in God without seeing his existence proved in a series of deductions or proved by some bayesian reasoning. Has anyone been convinced one way or another by discourse on this topic? At this point discussion about God or atheism is a just a very complicated Rorschach test.
Is another objection that we could only witness the fine tuning because we just so happen to be in an environment where the fine tuning can be observed? I feel as if the firing squad analogy defeats this. I know you addressed this with the continental drift example. However, with continental drift don’t we have examples of objects drifting away in certain patterns that match continental drift? Even on a much smaller scales (smaller scale).
The other objection I find troubling is we humans set arbitrary number values to these observations. I like to think about it as the lumber used to frame a house. Humans set, arbitrary values such as inches and feet. But if you look at all of the precise measurements that go into the framing of the house, it would be a little silly to say that all of those precise cuts and measurements are just arbitrary values that humans gave. I wonder if it would be fallacious to say well. All of those cuts and measurements could’ve been anything even if we only observed one house we could conceivably think that the values could’ve in infinity different . I might be wrong about this.
I really enjoy your ability to look at these issues with unique perspectives. I am curious how important the existence of humanity itself is to your argument. Would the FTA support theism if humans did not in fact exist?
Example 1: 100 million years ago, before the evolution of conscious humanity, a nearby star goes supernova and earth is uninhabitable to all forms of life. Laws of physics have not changed. Humanity has never existed, though life once did. Is there a god?
Example 2: tomorrow, a nearby star goes supernova, eventually killing all life on earth. Afterwards, is there a god?
To what degree of certainty can we say that "nothing" would exist if the constants were tuned differently? Does that not presume that whatever alternately-tuned universe would roughly obey the same physical rules as ours? (Which seems dubious to me)
Yeah, the evidence is that there could be no life if the constants were tuned differently, conditional on the other physical laws that obtain. But this is still evidence for fine-tuning.
Suppose that on another conceivable set of physical laws, the range of the life-supporting constants is very wide. It's still surprising that given our laws, the constants happen to land in the tiny space allowing for life to exist.
By analogy, suppose there is a dartboard with two halves. The right half is entirely green. The left half is entirely red, save for one green circle 10^-100 m in diameter. Life can exist if the dart (constants) hits a green area (life-supporting range). The green right half represents life-supporting ranges under other physical laws. Despite the life-supporting range composing over half of the dart board, if we find the dart in the 10^-100 circle on the left, we should expect someone put it there.
How do you know that God isn’t perfectly evil? You’ve offered arguments for the existence of a demiurge of some sort, but I haven’t yet seen arguments for a perfectly good one (although it’s possible you’ve made such arguments elsewhere and I just haven’t seen them). You define God as omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being, but the last omni- just seems utterly taken for granted. Based on our observations of the world, it seems much likelier that an omniscient omnipotent being would be evil. (Not “perfectly” evil, however. There is some good in the world. If It was perfectly evil, that would create a “problem of good”. Assuming God has a moral character, I see no reason we should assume it’s “omni-“ or “perfect” in either direction).
You write “If one’s objection to fine-tuning is that we will not be around forever, this is straightforwardly question-begging. If theism is true, this is almost certainly false. A perfect being would have no reason to snuff us out after just a few decades.” A perfect being in your understanding would also have no reason to permit the Holocaust, or factory farming, or wild animal suffering, and yet It does so anyway. how can you possibly understand the motivations and goals of an omniscient omnipotent being? If such an agent exists, we have far more in common with ants than we have with It, and attempting to predict its behavior in this manner strikes me as very silly.
He literally has an entire blog entry on the Evil God challenge, as well as several entries arguing why the prior probability of the omni-God is higher.
"A perfect being in your understanding would also have no reason to permit the Holocaust, or factory farming, or wild animal suffering, and yet It does so anyway. how can you possibly understand the motivations and goals of an omniscient omnipotent being?" - Wait, so are you endorsing sceptical theism? Cool, so there's no problem of evil then.
1. Suppose, for reductio, that the worst conceivable objection to the FTA -- the puddle analogy -- doesn't exist.
2. If the worst conceivable objection to the FTA doesn't exist, then we can conceive of an objection that is worse than the worst conceivable objection to the FTA (namely, an existent puddle analogy).
3. We cannot conceive of an objection that is worse than the worst conceivable objection to the FTA.
4. So, the worst conceivable objection to the FTA -- the puddle analogy -- exists.
It's knowable a priori that *someone* would make this objection... so maybe we shouldn't be irritated about it!
Interesting argument. However this does not necessitate the existence of the puddle analogy as the worst possible objection to the FTA.
It could have been any other objection the worst one, but it is this one. Not by necessity, it just happens to be.
So this "ontological" argument for the worst possible objection to the FTA only goes to the point that there is a worst objection to the FTA but it can't necessitate which one is it.
It’s not that deep. He’s just saying some argument by definition has to be the worst in a funny/quippy way.
"The puddle goes wrong in falsely assuming that the conditions that will produce them are very rare. But this is true in the case of fine-tuning, and has been established to be so by physicists."
We do not understand the process by which our universal constants were set well enough to make this claim. You're putting too much credence on the claims of some physicists - the science here is much more uncertain than this.
The steel man god of the gaps argument is “we were not sufficiently creative to think of evolution in the past, so perhaps we are not sufficiently creative to figure out an alternative hypothesis to fine tuning in the present.” The answer to it has to be logically excluding the possibility of other solutions.
Agreed that Douglas Adams wrote some hilarious books. However, I think your objection to puddles is a straw man. In your quote of Adams, he is clear that the puddle finds itself in a very specific hole, one that conforms to it perfectly. All the microscopic nooks and crannies are uniquely ideal to house the exact shape of the puddle. It is not a common easily replicated hole. The hole is likely one of a kind in its microscopic structure, statistically improbable.
I don't know if you've explained this before but wouldn't fine tuning still be a problem even if you assume the universe was made by God? You're simply pushing the fine-tuning back because now God needs to be fine-tuned to want to create a universe like this one as opposed to any other. And if you appeal to moral realism to explain why God would want to create us then the moral facts would need to be fine-tuned such that it would be good to create beings like us.
It's true that now God still needs to be one of many ways he conceivably be. But if we simply posit that he is perfect, that would explain fine tuning. And out of all the ways God might be, perfection is relatively simple. So it ought to have a certain Ockam appeal
How would that explain anything? Why would a perfect God create this universe instead of any other one?
Because this universe is better than an untuned one. A perfect being would rather crate a better universe than a worse one
But now you're just pushing the fine-tuning back to the moral facts/laws. The moral facts/laws would need to be fine-tuned in order to make this universe better than any other random universe we could conceive
>By chance one would not expect continents to fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
Yet more evidence against globetards. Have you ever seen a globe shaped jigsaw puzzle?
>If the cosmological constant were different, for instance, the evolutionary process could never have gotten started.
If the cosmological constant were different, and its value didn't vary with respect to time (or space), and the mass-energy content of the universe wasn't altered to offset the constant's delta, and the strength of G didn't change to also offset the constant's delta, and God didn't interfere with the expansion rate of the universe in any other metaphysically possible way, the evolutionary process could never have gotten started.*
More important is that even if we do hold all that other stuff fixed, it's still false that the cosmological constant being different would have prevented evolutionary processes from getting started. The cosmological constant could have been at least 200 times bigger and infinity times smaller (this last point is actually an understatement - it could have been negative, too), and life would still be possible, even life that is just like the life that actually exists on Earth.
The part about the puddle disappearing sounds like a followup argument, not part of the argument against fine-tuning. We are mistaken like the puddle, therefore God doesn’t exist, therefore we should worry about disappearing. Not “natural laws show we should worry about disappearing, therefore God doesn’t exist”.
I went and found the original context (an essay in The Salmon of Doubt) and it seems to support this view. Immediately before your quote, Adams gives a non-analogical version of the same argument, but it doesn’t include the disappearing part: it ends by saying that early man reached “the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him.” Then, immediately following your quote, Adams elaborates on the disappearing idea in non-analogical context with the text below. Taken literally, Adams seems to be arguing that humanity should be worrying about how to survive the death of the sun in ~5 billion years. That seems a bit absurd to me, but I’d like to imagine that he also had shorter-term existential risks in mind. Either way, this isn’t part of the argument against God. Quote follows:
> We all know that at some point in the future the universe will come to an end, and at some other point, considerably in advance from that but still not immediately pressing, the sun will explode. We feel there’s plenty of time to worry about that, but on the other hand that’s a very dangerous thing to say. Look at what’s supposed to be going to happen on the first of January 2000—let’s not pretend that we didn’t have a warning that the century was going to end! I think that we need to take a larger perspective on who we are and what we are doing here if we are going to survive in the long term.
Who fine tuned this god to fine tune the universe?
I think the puddle analogy is better than you give it credit for. It's not ignoring the fact that fine tuning is super unlikely - the point is that we should be skeptical of claims that the universe is super finely-tuned for life that rely on assumptions that conscious life must be similar to us. If we do, we're like the puddle, assuming that because the universe's laws seem perfect for allowing creatures like us to exist, they must have been made for us. A lot of arguments for fine-tuning point to things like carbon-based chemistry, and while these things are obviously necessary for human life, I don't think we can just assume that a universe without them couldn't have very different forms of life. Even the assumption that all life must exist on planets orbiting stars doesn't really seem warranted if we're considering universes with very different physics from our own.
The only claims of fine-tuning that seem to get around this objection are those based on the entropy of the early universe and the possibility that the universe might recollapse on itself if the cosmological constant was different. But neither the entropy of the universe nor the cosmological constant are finely-tuned for life (physicists often talk about the cosmological constant being finely tuned, but that's using a completely different meaning of the phrase "fine-tuning"). Both of them just needed to be low for life to exist, and both of them are way lower than they have to be for life to exist. The only reason that these low values are considered surprising is that there are specific models of how these constants get their values that, if true, would imply that they should have much larger values than they actually have. But obviously, that just means those models are wrong about how the values of these constants came about. It doesn't mean that there's no way to naturalistically explain their values - on the contrary, it seems entirely plausible for a naturalistic mechanism to give them low values.
"But obviously, that just means those models are wrong about how the values of these constants came about." - So essentially you are willing to accept our best physics... *unless* that theory would imply a good argument for theism, then an otherwise highly successful theory needs to be rejected. And people say THEISTS are the science deniers!
A science denier would be someone who keeps believing a certain physical model even after it makes a prediction about the value of a physical constant that's off by 122 orders of magnitude. What do you think science is? It's the process of updating our theories of how the world works to match experimental observations, not the process of continuing to believe models that we know are wrong.
And by the way, all physicists (yes, literally all of them) agree that what you're calling "our best physics" is wrong. What do you think all those particle accelerators, dark matter searches, and precision cosmology measurements are for? They're to get data to find out what the right theory is, since we know that a theory of particle physics that doesn't include dark matter; cosmic inflation; a mechanism for neutrino masses; accurate predictions of the vacuum energy, Higgs mass, or CP violate phase of the CKM matrix; or even gravity (yes, seriously, our current "best model" of particle physics doesn't even include gravity) cannot possibly be the final theory. The Standard Model of particle physics was never even meant to be a theory of everything - it was always meant to be only a low-energy approximation. But I guess we should just pretend that it is the theory of everything because it's "our best physics" and chalk up all discrepancies to the hand of God. Wouldn't want to be "anti-science" by actually doing science, would we?
The response in your first paragraph only works if you think theism has a very low prior - then from "If theory X, then theism; not theism; therefore, not theory X" you get a good modus tollens argument against the theory which predicts such an unlikely result. But then I wanna see the argument why theism has a very low prior.
Or in other words: The fact that an observation is unexpected on naturalism only gives you a good reason to doubt the observation if you already assume naturalism in the background.
Do you think it's expected on theism that God would make the correct model of the laws of physics be one that predicts that the cosmological constant should be 122 orders of magnitude larger than it actually is? The reasoning you're trying employ here would imply that literally any unsolved problem in physics is proof that God exists, and that anyone who suggests that maybe the problem is actually because our understanding of physics is wrong is assuming atheism.
And besides, this response ignores the fact that we know the model is wrong for a bunch of other reasons as well. If we actually had a full theory that predicts every known physical phenomenon with no experimental anomalies and no UV divergences, but it still required fine-tuning of some constants, then you would have a point. But we don't have anything close to that.
Quite the opposite - I am saying that the *positive* evidence we have is evidence for theism, not the *absence* of a solution to some kind of problem.
Yes, we know they are "wrong" in the same sense we know that either QM or General Relativity has to be wrong in at least one way, given their seeming incompatibility - but no sane physicists would deduce from this that we shouldn't take the claims that QM and GR make to be *evidence*. Again, that's just blatant science denialism.
> Quite the opposite - I am saying that the *positive* evidence we have is evidence for theism, not the *absence* of a solution to some kind of problem.
Your "positive evidence" is a discrepancy between theory and observation that we don't currently know the explanation for. This is the same as any other unsolved problem in physics that has ever existed throughout all of history. There's no reason to think this one is any different from all the problems in the past that were eventually solved by normal, physical mechanisms, and claiming that it is "science denial" to say that the correct explanation is probably of this sort is nonsensical. And in fact, the theoretical prediction in this case is much more tenuous than past cases of unsolved problems. The calculation that gives an estimated value for the cosmological constant that's 122 orders of magnitude higher than the actual value requires not just using our current Standard Model understanding but also making assumptions about how the true theory of everything that the SM is an approximation of works (for example, assuming that there is no new physics before the Planck scale, which is most likely false for reasons completely independent of the cosmological constant problem, assuming that there is no UV-IR coupling, etc.).
Tell me, what is the difference between your logic and someone who responds to the Michelson-Morley experiment by saying, "Our best understanding of electromagnetism requires the existence of the luminiferous ether to explain why Maxwell's equations are not Galilean invariant like Newton's are. Incredibly, this experiment proves that the luminiferous ether is finely-tuned to move in unison with the Earth. This is incredibly unlikely on naturalism - it must have been set up to move that way by God, perhaps to aid in our development of electromagnetic technology. Some people claim that our understanding of the ether must be wrong and that new physics will explain the Michelson-Morley result, but this only works if you assume theism has a very low prior. Then, from 'If ether, then theism; Not theism; Therefore, not ether,' you get a good modus tollens argument against the ether. But I wanna see the argument for why theism has a very low prior"? In both cases, we notice that a theory's prediction doesn't line up with experimental evidence and decide that this indicates a problem with the theory. So, we conclude that there is new physics that explains why the current theory got it wrong. This is how physics has always progressed. But you could explain away any experimental result by saying that the original theory is actually correct, and God just directly manipulated a certain phenomenon to cause results that were unexpected on the theory. You are claiming that it is "science denial" to do the normal thing that scientists always do when a theory's predictions fail - come up with a new theory that predicts the correct result - and that instead, the only way to not be a science denier is to say that God caused the theory's predictions to fail. That it just not how science works. You can believe that God finely tuned the cosmological constant if you want - science doesn't disprove that this is the case - but to claim that anyone who doesn't accept this explanation is a science denier is completely ridiculous.
> Yes, we know they are "wrong" in the same sense we know that either QM or General Relativity has to be wrong in at least one way, given their seeming incompatibility - but no sane physicists would deduce from this that we shouldn't take the claims that QM and GR make to be *evidence*.
I am not claiming that we shouldn't take the claims of the Standard Model to be evidence. Obviously, claims made by the Standard Model that fall within SM's domain of validity are perfectly fine evidence. But the vacuum catastrophe (the failed prediction of the value of the cosmological constant) is not that - it requires stretching the Standard Model far beyond the domain it's been tested in, and past the point where we're already confident that new physics exists, which the predicted value of the cosmological constant will be sensitive to. And furthermore, we *know* that the Standard Model is wrong about this point because we've measured the cosmological constant, and it's not what SM says it should be. You don't believe that the Standard Model's prediction is right either - it's just that you think the failure of the prediction is explained by God intentionally making the cosmological constant lower than SM physics says it should be, whereas I think there's probably some normal physical explanation. The only real question here is, "Why did the theoretical prediction fail?", not, "Did the theoretical prediction fail?" So what exactly do you think the failed theoretical prediction is supposed to be evidence for?
Also, if you think that the correct explanation is, "God set the physical constants to the values they have," then you also think the physical models for how their values came about are wrong. Those physical models don't involve divine intervention.
This question of God's existence has been agonized about for hundreds of years at this point, by people far more talented than myself or the writer. It all misses the point. Religion requires faith, the ability to believe in God without seeing his existence proved in a series of deductions or proved by some bayesian reasoning. Has anyone been convinced one way or another by discourse on this topic? At this point discussion about God or atheism is a just a very complicated Rorschach test.
Is another objection that we could only witness the fine tuning because we just so happen to be in an environment where the fine tuning can be observed? I feel as if the firing squad analogy defeats this. I know you addressed this with the continental drift example. However, with continental drift don’t we have examples of objects drifting away in certain patterns that match continental drift? Even on a much smaller scales (smaller scale).
The other objection I find troubling is we humans set arbitrary number values to these observations. I like to think about it as the lumber used to frame a house. Humans set, arbitrary values such as inches and feet. But if you look at all of the precise measurements that go into the framing of the house, it would be a little silly to say that all of those precise cuts and measurements are just arbitrary values that humans gave. I wonder if it would be fallacious to say well. All of those cuts and measurements could’ve been anything even if we only observed one house we could conceivably think that the values could’ve in infinity different . I might be wrong about this.
After skimming this article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_Ridge idk if there is a solid ruler measurement done. I think the expansion rate is inferred from other geological data.
Have you addressed electrons in love anywhere? Because imo that one also works as an objection to PPH.
I really enjoy your ability to look at these issues with unique perspectives. I am curious how important the existence of humanity itself is to your argument. Would the FTA support theism if humans did not in fact exist?
Example 1: 100 million years ago, before the evolution of conscious humanity, a nearby star goes supernova and earth is uninhabitable to all forms of life. Laws of physics have not changed. Humanity has never existed, though life once did. Is there a god?
Example 2: tomorrow, a nearby star goes supernova, eventually killing all life on earth. Afterwards, is there a god?
To what degree of certainty can we say that "nothing" would exist if the constants were tuned differently? Does that not presume that whatever alternately-tuned universe would roughly obey the same physical rules as ours? (Which seems dubious to me)
Yeah, the evidence is that there could be no life if the constants were tuned differently, conditional on the other physical laws that obtain. But this is still evidence for fine-tuning.
Suppose that on another conceivable set of physical laws, the range of the life-supporting constants is very wide. It's still surprising that given our laws, the constants happen to land in the tiny space allowing for life to exist.
By analogy, suppose there is a dartboard with two halves. The right half is entirely green. The left half is entirely red, save for one green circle 10^-100 m in diameter. Life can exist if the dart (constants) hits a green area (life-supporting range). The green right half represents life-supporting ranges under other physical laws. Despite the life-supporting range composing over half of the dart board, if we find the dart in the 10^-100 circle on the left, we should expect someone put it there.
How do you know that God isn’t perfectly evil? You’ve offered arguments for the existence of a demiurge of some sort, but I haven’t yet seen arguments for a perfectly good one (although it’s possible you’ve made such arguments elsewhere and I just haven’t seen them). You define God as omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being, but the last omni- just seems utterly taken for granted. Based on our observations of the world, it seems much likelier that an omniscient omnipotent being would be evil. (Not “perfectly” evil, however. There is some good in the world. If It was perfectly evil, that would create a “problem of good”. Assuming God has a moral character, I see no reason we should assume it’s “omni-“ or “perfect” in either direction).
Also, “good” and “evil” are fuzzy, ill-defined notions. It doesn’t seem implausible to me that these are just parochial, human constructs and imposing them onto God is cartoonish anthropomorphism. (I don’t find your arguments for moral realism very persuasive https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iiauqy6bhStd2GDQT/contra-bentham-s-bulldog-on-moral-realism)
You write “If one’s objection to fine-tuning is that we will not be around forever, this is straightforwardly question-begging. If theism is true, this is almost certainly false. A perfect being would have no reason to snuff us out after just a few decades.” A perfect being in your understanding would also have no reason to permit the Holocaust, or factory farming, or wild animal suffering, and yet It does so anyway. how can you possibly understand the motivations and goals of an omniscient omnipotent being? If such an agent exists, we have far more in common with ants than we have with It, and attempting to predict its behavior in this manner strikes me as very silly.
He literally has an entire blog entry on the Evil God challenge, as well as several entries arguing why the prior probability of the omni-God is higher.
"A perfect being in your understanding would also have no reason to permit the Holocaust, or factory farming, or wild animal suffering, and yet It does so anyway. how can you possibly understand the motivations and goals of an omniscient omnipotent being?" - Wait, so are you endorsing sceptical theism? Cool, so there's no problem of evil then.